Our story



The story of our technology started in 2004 when the medical director of the UK National Society for Epilepsy asked Acurable’s founder, Professor Esther Rodriguez-Villegas, to use her pioneering ultra low power microelectronics design techniques to develop an apnoea monitoring technology. The aim was to prevent Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP), which kills up to 1000 people a year in the UK alone.

It quickly became apparent that the challenges behind creating a monitoring system like this were not only related to reducing the power, and consequently the size, of the system. Although the device did have to be unobtrusive, and the batteries had to last for a long time, it also had to detect apnoeas very accurately, since missing a critical event could be fatal, and false alarms would quickly lead to patients discontinuing its use. Existing sensing modalities and signal processing algorithms were very far from meeting the necessary usability and clinical criteria. After a while, it became obvious that a solution would not be found just by trying to adapt or optimise these sensing modalities. Fundamental limitations made all of them unviable.

Professor Esther Rodriguez-Villegas

This started a fascinating multidisciplinary research journey, looking for knowledge and solutions for some long-standing physiological monitoring challenges. These were even more difficult when coupled to the very tight engineering constraints associated to a wearable, and the almost unexplored issues associated with a medical device that patients were going to use themselves.

In the course of this journey, Prof. Rodriguez-Villegas realised that some of those challenges were common to many other healthcare problems. Thus, the team’s solution opened the doors to new technologies which could improve patients’ diagnosis and management in a very wide range of healthcare contexts. This particularly applied to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

Acurable was founded in 2016 to develop those solutions.

Main milestones

  • 2016

    Company founded

    Technology IP transferred from Imperial College London to Acurable Limited

    Imperial logo

  • 2017

    Financing round

    Acurable raises £2.1m from Venture Capital funds Kindred Capital and Alma Mundi Ventures

    Kindred logo Mundi logo

  • 2018

    Microsoft ScaleUp

    Invited to join the Microsoft ScaleUp program for fast-growing start-ups in Europe.

    Microsoft Accelerator logo

  • 2018

    Spanish office

    Opened the company's first overseas office in Seville, Spain

  • 2018

    Innovate UK grants

    Awarded 2 Innovate UK grants totalling £1.2m to continue research for cardiac and paediatric applications

    Innovate UK

  • 2018

    Recipient of multiple industry awards

    Chosen as a Disrupt 100 company out of over 5 million global startups and corporate ventures considered. In the top 15 of the London Tech50 companies two years running.

    Disrupt100 logo London Tech 50 logo

  • 2019

    ISO 13485

    Passed ISO 13485 certification for medical device manufacturers

    ISO 13485 logo

  • 2019

    Successful clinical validation

    Proved sleep apnoea diagnosis equivalence to ambulatory gold-standard (results pending publication)

    Royal Free Hospital logo

  • 2020

    CE mark of AcuPebble SA100

    First medical device to receive the CE mark for the automated diagnosis of sleep apnoea in adults.

  • 2021

    AcuPebble SA100 selected for NIA

    AcuPebble SA100 was selected by the award-winning NHS Innovation Accelerator to be supported to scale across the NHS in England.

    NIA logo

  • 2021

    Acurable selected to join the Tech Nation Upscale 7.0 cohort

    Acurable joined a network of the UK's fastest growing tech companies as part of the Tech Nation Upscale 7.0 cohort.

    Tech Nation logo

  • 2021

    FDA clearance

    AcuPebble SA100 receives FDA clearance for the automated detection of obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) in the USA.